... Contents Lobster 60 Gordon Brown: in the country of the blind.... Simon Matthews N ot so long ago the end of a government would be marked by the publication of a couple of ministerial diaries and some memoirs trickling into the public domain within 2-3 years of its demise. Today any change of administration is followed immediately by a slew of books, as its participants cash in with lucrative publishing deals and get their version of history into print as quickly as possible. Thus has the demise of Labour in May 2010 been marked. The accounts that have appeared include the absurdly self-centred, stating-the-obvious-at-all- times tales of Peter Mandelson; the fantastic, optimistic and daytime ...

... Lord Browne's Body Beyond Business John Browne London: Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 2010, £20, h/b British Higher Education is being completely reshaped in the light of the Browne Review. The intention is to remodel the system along American lines, using the huge increase in student fees to both drive forward marketisation and privatisation, and to reshape the culture of British HE with Humanities provision shrinking and Business and Management Studies expanding (nearly one in four US students studies Business or Management subjects) .1 It is worth remembering that the Review was set up by New Labour with the personnel appointed to produce exactly that outcome. There was no student representation on the panel ( ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 47) Summer 2004 Last| Contents| Next Issue 47 Halliburton: Winning the Brown and Root Way Colin Challen MP First, buy your senator It wasn't long after their election in 2000 that the business backgrounds of George W. Bush and Richard Cheney became mired in controversy. Cheney's business career was not as long as Bush's, but it personifies the role of crony capitalism endemic to U.S. politics. Cheney's role as Halliburton's (1) Chief Executive between 1995 and 2000, was but one connection among many in the long history of Halliburton's intimate reliance on politicians and government. In appointing his Vice Presidential running mate, Bush was said to ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 49) Summer 2005 Last| Contents| Next Issue 49 Gordon Brown Tom Bower London: HarperCollins, 2004, £20, h/b I heard Bower interviewed on Radio 4. He said that he had begun this book as something of an admirer of Brown but had changed his mind while writing it. Change his mind he certainly did: this is a serious assault on the man. Although there is little which is new in this tale of egos, rows, sulking, press character assassination, shunning, and internecine struggle between two gangs, Brown's and Blair's, it useful to be reminded of the centrality of Geoffrey Robinson's money ...

... was the only magazine in which you would find economics and UFOs. Though this isn't true – Nexus, for one, often has both – I knew what he meant and took it as the compliment he intended; and though there are no UFOs in this issue, here is a smidgeon of political economics. For years now Chancellor Gordon Brown has taken the credit for the UK's low interest rates and low inflation. In his speech to the Labour Party conference on 27 September this year he said, for the umpteenth time: 'Britain today has the lowest inflation for thirty years.... [and] the lowest interest rates for forty years...' Brown...

... unresolved to this day. Although this may mean that his views ultimately had little effect, it does not mean that they went unnoticed at the time or that political leaders did not attempt to alter the economic and political outlook of the UK. Harold Wilson certainly appears to have arrived at very similar views on a number of topics. George Brown may have; some of his advisors at the Department of Economic Affairs in 1964-1966 certainly did.( [1]) I But James Callaghan, Chancellor of the Exchequer 1964-1967 and the Prime Minister 1976-1979, gave no indication of interest in such matters. The recent death of Callaghan and the continuing controversies about his legacy, to the ...

... (c) www.lobster-magazine.co.uk (Issue 39) Summer 2000 Last| Contents| Next Issue 39 Euro-bound? Or: the same river twice I met Paul Routledge, the biographer of Gordon Brown, a couple of years ago. 'Does Brown understand economics?' I asked him. 'Well, he reads lots of big books,' said Routledge. 'This is not the same thing.' Of course I asked the wrong question. What I should have asked was: does Gordon Brown understand British economic history? Or: does he understand economic politics? In any case, I would have been asking a question to which I knew the answer. Brown knows little of British ...

... reading, the meat of the book has to be what it tells us about Gordon Brown's relationship with Murdoch and his representatives and what Cameron had to do to get Murdoch to change sides. As Davies points out, since 1979, 'no British government has been elected without the support of Rupert Murdoch....Thatcher, Major, Blair and Brown have consistently cleared their diaries and welcomed him to the inner sanctum of their governments (and then disclosed as little as possible of what passed between them).' Brown, in this respect, was no different from his predecessors, continuing 'to cuddle up to News International'. At one point, when Rebekah Brooks became involved with ...

... Contents What went wrong, Gordon Brown? How the dream job turned sour Edited by Colin Hughes London: The Guardian, 2010, £8.99 The End of the Party: The Rise and Fall of New Labour Andrew Rawnsley London: Penguin/Viking, 2010, £25.00 Ghost Dancers David John Douglass Hastings: Christie Books, 2010, £12.95 The Silent State: Secrets, Surveillance and the Myth of British Democracy Heather Brooke London: William Heinemann, 2010, £12.99 Broonland: The Last Days of Gordon Brown Christopher Harvie London/New York: Verso, 2010, £8.99 (UK) Tom Easton It's too early to say much about the Lib-Con government, ...

... Conservatives. This indicates a degree of planning unusual in contemporary UK politics and shows that long before 2010 Cameron and Osborne realised the commonalities they had with some of the more recently elected Liberal Democrat MP's: a primary allegiance to personal liberty and a belief in free market economics.4 None of this mattered very much in 2006 or in 2007 when Gordon Brown finally ascended to the position of prime minister. If he thought about it at all, given his personal dealings with senior Liberal Democrats Ashdown, Kennedy, Campbell and Cable, Brown would have assumed that the Liberal Democrats would never do a deal with the Conservatives. But in late 2007 things changed. Firstly, Brown did not call ...